Misunderstanding Worship – {A Comic}

January 14, 2012

This is a true story. All true. Not sarcasm. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Our scene opens in Heaven. The gold streets. The grassy rolling hills. A constant 68 degrees. The sun never sets. Mansions as far as the eye can see. The air carries ambient Enya music everywhere. Each day is like the first day of summer vacation. You can’t help but sing hymns all the time—that is, when you aren’t playing the harp and flying, of course!

You know what I’m talking about: the real Heaven……cough, cough.

Yes, this is a story about Heaven.

You see, God is deficient. He needs us. Badly. More specifically: He needs our help. Our services. Yep, without us Heaven would really take a turn for the worse. Hopefully this little story will help explain why.

That’s right. There’s a huge power plant in Heaven. It runs on blood. The animal rights angels have tried to get God to upgrade, or at least consider alternative fuels. Like incense. But no…no smell—not even incense—is as pleasing of an aroma to the Lord as the smell of blood and burning meat.

At this point, you may be thinking of a few things you’ve read. Like Isaiah 1:11. Or Hebrews 10:4. But believe me, if you think for one minute that those verses say what they say, you are sorely mistaken. Because they don’t—and don’t ask why!

Well, it seems like those angels finally got their wish! You see, after that whole “Jesus thing”, God sort of turned into a hippie. People started saying words like “love” and “father” when they talked about God. They started talking a lot about forgiveness, and peace, and joy, and just being flat-out happy in general! Yep, things have really changed in Heaven.

Now don’t get me wrong—God still needs people! That power plant can’t run on faith, after all! But, God stripped out all the guts of that thing and converted it into a brand new state-of-the-art power plant that runs almost entirely on music! I say “almost entirely”, because some of the cutting-edge angel scientists have some hokey theories that there’s something more to it than that—but I just try not to think about it!

So won’t you do your part? Won’t you help keep the lights on in Heaven? God needs your songs. It doesn’t matter if your heart’s in it or not. Just show up, and sing! Please? After all, we don’t want to have to go back to the old way of doing things…

I am a slow processor, and I appreciate sarcasm but sometimes it takes me minute.
So it went something like this,
Well he’s saying what worship is not.
But I don’t get his point.
…
Oh! It’s the heart he’s saying it’s about your heart!

Yep. We are taught, and we practice, that the only acceptable worship is “music”. We MUST sing in a church service, or we haven’t worshipped God at all–that’s what we think. In fact, “worship” in most peoples’ minds is just a synonym for “God-related music”.

BUT, the word worship is “worth + ship”. In other words: what is God worth to you? And, 3000 years ago in the Middle East, you sang praises about important things. Really, I get the impression that they sang about pretty much everything. We normally don’t do that in America, so why do we do it in church?

What do we do with the things we worship? Like, if you get a new car, or a new phone? You talk about it–a lot. Sometimes, we talk about our important things so much that people get tired of hearing about them. That’s what they’re worth to us though. We’d do anything, in fact, for the VERY important things–like children, jobs, houses. Would we do that about God? Or, to recoin the Old Testament word: what would we sacrifice to follow God? That’s a heart attitude. Not a powerpoint-led song by a Christian pop artist that our church bought the rights to, and we stand and sing and then listen to some guy for an hour. That’s misguided at best.